Under the surface: silvering in Adrian Athenaeum

Abstract

The recovery of a metal workshop dated to the sixth century AD, superimposed to the Hadrian’s Athenaeum in Piazza Madonna di Loreto, Rome, provided the opportunity to identify a series of metallurgical processes linked to the two chaînes opératoires related to copper, bronze, silver and lead productions. Some analysed fragments presented superficial treatment identified as silvering, the focus of this paper. The main aim is to investigate the signs of the surface treatment on the artefacts and discuss what methods would be best employed to analyse and interpret them in order to identify the process to which they relate. Different analytical techniques were used to obtain information on the superficial layer, and their pros and cons are presented so as to discuss how analytical limits can affect the interpretation of a process and the identification of an object. The conclusions reached here are necessarily limited because of the scarce number of samples analysed and the techniques used.

Keywords:

• Metallurgy
• Alloying
• Silvering
• Copper
• Bronze
• Chlorine

The author thanks all the researchers from the Universita’ G. D’Annunzio in Chieti involved in the first screening and cataloguing of the materials, namely, S. Prosperi, A. Iacone, M. Tornese and S. Antonelli; without their contribution, it would have been impossible to obtain so much information from such a small amount of material selected for the analyses. In particular, thanks go to Dr La Salvia for the constant support and discussion of the materials. The author also thanks Professor T. Anson and L. Tammita for their support during the analyses and the experiments and Brunel University. Dr Serlorenzi and Mr Ricci are also acknowledged for allowing the analysis of the material.

Notes

This paper is part of a special issue on Arts and Surfaces